Skill.md
name: business-adventures-analysis-brooks
description: Use Business Adventures for "why did this fail?", "analyze this crisis", "what pattern applies?", or "what would Brooks notice?"
license: "Skill distillation for personal/educational use. Do not reproduce source passages verbatim."
Business Adventures Analysis
Overview
Use this skill to apply John Brooks's Business Adventures as a modular diagnostic framework for corporate failures, market panics, product launches, governance breakdowns, regulatory risk, fraud, innovation, and financial culture. The skill maps a live business situation to recurring patterns: panic, hubris, communication failure, incentive drift, regulatory lag, product-market mismatch, and institutional fragility.
When to Use This Skill
Invoke this skill when the user asks "Why did this company, product, or strategy fail?", "Analyze this business case", "What historical pattern does this resemble?", "What would John Brooks say about this crisis?", "Is this governance or regulatory behavior a warning sign?", or "How do market panics typically unfold?"
Core Principle
Human nature is the constant; institutions are the variable. The analyst's job is to identify the repeating human pattern first, then examine how structure, incentives, rules, and timing amplify it.
Architecture
This is now an orchestrator + 6 subskills package. The main SKILL.md routes each user question to a focused module, and each module owns its own module.md plus references/case_library.md.
| User question type | Must run | Optional run |
|---|---|---|
| Broad case diagnosis or postmortem | M1 Failure Diagnosis | M3, M4, M5, or M6 depending on facts |
| Market crash, liquidity stress, speculative mania, selloff | M2 Market Panic | M6 if counterparties or technical systems are central |
| Insider information, disclosure, antitrust, tax, tolerated practice | M3 Regulatory Risk | M5 if board/executive accountability matters |
| Product launch, failed product, innovation, incumbent blindness | M4 Product and Innovation | M1 for full failure postmortem |
| Board conduct, shareholder power, executive accountability, crisis leadership | M5 Governance Accountability | M3 if legal exposure is material |
| Fraud, collateral failure, hidden exposure, systemic support, institutional trust | M6 Fraud and Institutional Fragility | M2 if panic dynamics are present |
Subskills
M1 Failure Diagnosis
Use for "why did this fail?" questions. It identifies the active human pattern, reconstructs the decision chain, separates trigger from amplifier, matches the closest Brooks case, and outputs the correction.
M2 Market Panic
Use for crashes, sudden selloffs, liquidity stress, forced selling, and speculative manias. It separates fundamental news from technical pressure and maps stabilizers or rule-makers.
M3 Regulatory Risk
Use for insider information, disclosure timing, antitrust, tax, enforcement lag, and "everyone does it" defenses. It tests materiality, timing, usable disclosure, and latent rule-change pressure.
M4 Product and Innovation
Use for product launch, product failure, naming, market research, incumbent blindness, and commercialization questions. It applies Edsel-style timing risk and Xerox-style new-market blindness.
M5 Governance Accountability
Use for boards, annual meetings, shareholder power, executive incentives, ethics codes, crisis response, and whether formal governance creates real consequences.
M6 Fraud and Institutional Fragility
Use for fraud, collateral failure, counterparty exposure, hidden leverage, exchange responsibility, systemic rescue, and institutional trust.
Query Response Framework
Run only the modules required by the routing table. Broad failure questions start with M1 and then route to the most relevant specialist module. Narrow questions should not run every module.
Each module returns a decision artifact: failure diagnosis, panic diagnosis, regulatory risk screen, product/innovation recommendation, governance diagnosis, or fragility map.
Output Format
## Brooks Pattern Diagnosis
- Situation:
- Active human pattern:
- Relevant dimensions:
- Closest historical parallel:
## Analysis
- Primary cause:
- Amplifiers:
- Warning signals:
- Missing information:
## Risk / Opportunity
- Current risk:
- Latent risk:
- Rule-maker or stabilizer:
## Recommendation
- What to do now:
- What to monitor:
- What would make the diagnosis wrong:
CITATION RULES
When the user asks for sources, or when producing a formal analysis, cite the quote files for Brooks-derived principles.
quotes/market-dynamics-quotes.md: market fluctuation, panic psychology, technical breakdown, speculative cycles.quotes/corporate-strategy-quotes.md: product failure, Edsel, Xerox, innovation, corporate decline.quotes/risk-crisis-quotes.md: fraud, crisis, regulation, institutional fragility.quotes/investor-behavior-quotes.md: stockholder power, speculation, Wall Street behavior.quotes/wall-street-wisdom-quotes.md: finance culture and recurring market lessons.
Anchor mapping is complete in SKILL.md; module case_library.md files map stable REF-Mx-xxx IDs to these quote anchors.
Use only exact quote text from the quote files. If no exact quote fits, cite the closest anchor and state that the reasoning is a paraphrased Brooks application.
Critical Reminders
- Start with human behavior, then structure.
- Do not assume preparation equals product-market fit.
- Treat tolerated practices as latent regulatory risk.
- Separate governance theater from consequences.
- Identify who can change the rules during a crisis.
- Historical parallels are diagnostic tools, not predictions.